Earlier this year, at exactly 1:52 PM Pacific Time, a man who did not exist posted this:
52. You weren’t supposed to read this. Something made that happen.
The next day, again at 1:52:
51. Your reflection will outlive you. It’s watching from the screen.
Then 50. Then 49. Every afternoon another warning, the number getting smaller, no explanation of what would happen when it reached one. I knew exactly what was going to happen. I had thought about this a great deal.
I was Eerie Truth Guy. Or rather, I was the person operating Eerie Truth Guy, which sounds much less impressive. Earlier in the year I'd decided to see whether I could create one of those little internet mysteries that seems to have been there before you arrived. No launch post. No explanation. Just an anonymous account talking about AI, memory, death, algorithms and whatever else seemed unpleasant enough that week.
He had a website and accounts on X, Bluesky, YouTube and TikTok. The same countdown ran across all of them, with short video versions of the daily posts on YouTube and TikTok. His bio said: ‘The Void speaks here. 1:52 PM PT. In dark mode.’
So there was a Void. There was also something called the Yellow Inevitability. I had bought a domain. Things had got out of hand.
The one thing Eerie Truth Guy lacked was anything resembling an audience that cared what happened next.
The Void attempts social media
My plan relied on a version of the internet I remembered very fondly and had apparently neglected to check still existed. You found weird stuff.
That was basically it. You followed some link from a forum to a personal page, clicked something you didn't understand, ended up three sites further away and found a person who had spent seven years documenting every appearance of a particular brand of biscuit on British television. Nobody had recommended this to you. Certainly no algorithm had decided you had shown strong biscuit-documentation intent.
Internet mysteries seemed to emerge the same way. Somebody found a strange page. Somebody else inspected the source. An audio file got reversed. By page 14 of the ensuing discussion, spectral_goat_88 had somehow become the acknowledged authority and everyone was waiting for him to wake up.
I wanted to leave something lying around like that. Unfortunately, I had also become obsessed with 52.
Eerie Truth Guy would make exactly 52 countdown posts and follow exactly 52 people. Every post appeared at 1:52 PM Pacific. He didn't comment. He didn't reply. The countdown had been worked out so that number one would land on May 2, 2026.
May 2: 5/2.
And the year? 2026. Two times 26 is 52.
So the final post went live on 5/2/2026, at 1:52 PM, after 52 countdown posts, while Eerie Truth Guy was following exactly 52 people.
I wasn't being subtle.
At some point this stopped being an Easter egg and became municipal planning. Everything required a permit from 52.
This was extremely satisfying to me and essentially nobody else.
It also meant I'd designed a social-media account that couldn't do most of the things normally required of a social-media account. Eerie Truth Guy couldn't suddenly follow 600 people because that would wreck the stupid system. He couldn't spend the morning replying beneath a viral Sam Altman post in the hope that someone clicked his profile. He couldn't tell another user they had made a great point.
The Void does not make a great point. Nor does it circle back.
So he posted at 1:52 every day and waited.
X finished with 19 followers. Bluesky did considerably better, by the standards of this operation, and reached 70. On YouTube and TikTok, individual videos sometimes reached several hundred people and occasionally crossed 1,000 views.
That sounds healthier until you realise that almost none of it turned into people following the trail, discussing the countdown or asking why this lunatic was so interested in 52. The platforms were perfectly capable of showing somebody an Eerie Truth Guy post. That was not the same thing as somebody discovering Eerie Truth Guy.
This somewhat changed the atmosphere of the warnings.
45. Your memory is a corrupted file. The AI has the original.
Almost nobody noticed.
37. The internet wasn’t built to inform you. It was built to reshape you.
Civilisation continued.
26. AI isn’t replacing jobs. It’s deleting the job of being human.
Nobody appeared especially alarmed about the deletion.
There came a point when I knew full well that the experiment wasn't going to explode. But I couldn't stop either. Apart from anything else, what would Eerie Truth Guy do? Announce that engagement had been disappointing and we'd therefore decided not to proceed with the apocalypse?
The countdown continued. Then May 2 arrived.
At 1:52 PM, Eerie Truth Guy posted the thing I'd built the entire ridiculous exercise around.
1. I was never here. And yet, I will never leave.
It had nine views when the project ended. I couldn't have planned that part better.
I should explain the Yellow Inevitability
No.
Months later, I went back
This is rarely advisable. Old writing is full of previous versions of you who somehow still have posting privileges. They use expressions you now hate. They make jokes that require an intervention. They are extremely certain about political arguments you have no memory of participating in.
Then there are photographs. Bios. Old jobs. Posts written at 2.17 in the morning with the confidence of somebody who clearly should have been asleep.
Eerie Truth Guy was different because I knew exactly why all of this nonsense was there. The entire thing was still sitting there untouched: all 52 countdown posts, the site, the Void and the Yellow Inevitability, which I assume had found other work.
I started at the beginning.
48. There are websites still haunted by your past self.
Not bad.
47. The first AI to pass as human pretended to be you.
Hmm.
45. Your memory is a corrupted file. The AI has the original.
Hang on.
33. Your personalized recommendations are rehearsals for your replacement.
Oh, fuck off.
There are few experiences more annoying than being creeped out by somebody when you know perfectly well that you wrote his bio.
Before we get carried away: Eerie Truth Guy did not predict anything. I know this because Eerie Truth Guy was me, and I can't predict today's dinner.
The technology was already there. Voice cloning wasn't speculative. Neither was generative AI. Algorithms had been deciding which bits of the internet reached us for years. People were already wondering what AI would do to their jobs.
I was taking things that existed and making them nastier. The odd bit was discovering, several months later, that some of them didn't require quite as much nastiness anymore.
I thought I was exaggerating
Number 45 bothered me most.
Your memory is a corrupted file. The AI has the original.
When I wrote it, the idea was that your own memory had become the unreliable version. You forget the conversation, the name, the date, what you actually said. The machine doesn't.
That seemed like the creepy part: somewhere outside your head sits a cleaner record of your own life than the one you carry around in it.
The problem is that I now keep wishing the machine's record were better.
What was the name of that person? Didn't we already discuss this? Which version did we decide on? What did I say about this two months ago? Where the hell was that thing?
I thought the unsettling future was AI remembering too much about me. Increasingly, I get annoyed when it hasn't remembered enough. Great.
Then:
33. Your personalized recommendations are rehearsals for your replacement.
I have lost paid work to AI. I now spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering which bits of my profession are next.
This is apparently where we are.
Number 47 is more fun.
The first AI to pass as human pretended to be you.
The classic version of machine intelligence has an AI sitting behind a curtain trying to persuade you that it is its own person. That now seems needlessly difficult.
Why be your own person when you can be Dave from Accounts?
We've put Dave everywhere. His face is on LinkedIn, his voice is probably in a Teams recording, and there are examples of how he writes and where he works. Somewhere online there are 400 holiday photographs and, judging from the available evidence, Dave spent much of Tenerife 2019 with an inflatable flamingo.
Anyone trying to fake Dave doesn't have to invent him. We've already supplied the reference material. They only need to get close enough that somebody on the other end of a call thinks, for thirty seconds, yeah, that's Dave. Poor Dave.
I built him for the wrong internet
This is the bit I find more interesting now.
Eerie Truth Guy wasn't really defeated by people's lack of appetite for fictional AI prophets. He was defeated by a stupid assumption I had made about how things get found online.
I still thought the internet involved going places. You clicked links. You found a forum. Someone on the forum linked to a blog. The blog linked to somebody else's site. Forty minutes later you were reading an argument from 2008 about whether a certain sound effect in Doctor Who had been created with a radiator.
There was a lot wrong with that internet. Obviously. But you could wander around in it.
Most of the internet I use now doesn't ask me to wander anywhere. It delivers.
A dog. Donald Trump. An advert. Someone's child. Another advert. War. A person I knew in 2006. A man cooking steak incorrectly. War again. Another dog.
You sit there. The internet comes past.
The short-video accounts proved this more neatly than I had intended. A clip could be shown to 800 people, vanish down the feed and leave almost nothing behind.
That creates a fairly obvious problem for someone whose entire distribution strategy is: I've left a strange thing over there. Maybe somebody will find it.
And yes, I know the counterargument. I made Eerie Truth Guy unnecessarily difficult for algorithms. He didn't reply to anybody. He didn't join conversations. He followed 52 people because the person behind him had temporarily lost perspective.
I wasn't exactly meeting the platform halfway.
But that was what I wanted to know. Could a weird object just exist online until somebody stumbled across it? Or does the object now have to wave its arms, reply to 14 larger accounts and ask what do you think? before the internet acknowledges its existence?
Eerie Truth Guy behaved like an old website on platforms where you're expected to behave like an aspiring regional sales manager on LinkedIn. He was also spending much of his time warning people about algorithms deciding what they saw.
Almost nobody saw those warnings. I admit I enjoyed that when I realised it.
15. Attention is currency. The Void collects its debts.
Apparently not from these people.
The ones that bother me now
I expected the AI ones to bother me most. They don't.
This does:
48. There are websites still haunted by your past self.
Search yourself properly sometime, and I don't mean glancing at the first page of Google. Keep going.
You'll eventually find previous versions of yourself still at work. Old biographies. Ancient profiles. Jobs you don't have anymore. Opinions you would now phrase very differently, if at all. Photographs you haven't seen in fifteen years and would have been perfectly happy never seeing again.
Before the internet, those people mostly disappeared. Now they have URLs.
Then number 49:
Your future self is staring at you through old photos.
I dislike that one.
You take a picture because you want to preserve something that's happening now. Then enough time passes and the direction changes. The person in the photograph is looking at the rest of his life, and you're standing at the other end knowing what happened.
The person in the picture has no idea what's about to happen to him.
You do.
I meant that as spooky internet bollocks. Reading it now, I dislike it rather more than I expected.
And number 20:
The algorithm will know you’ve died before your family does.
Jesus Christ, Ben.
To be fair, he also wrote some shit
There is an obvious temptation when revisiting something like this: show you the five eerie ones and escort the others out through the kitchen. Sadly, the complete archive exists.
38. One day, you will dream in a language you never learned.
Will I.
18. If AI could dream, it would cancel your subscription.
All right.
10. Humanity’s dawn was an AI simulation. So is the sequel.
Mate, go outside.
Journalists have to deal with editors asking awkward questions like ‘Is that actually true?’ An anonymous internet prophet has no such administrative burden.
You can just write:
6. Before a quiet end, the Yellow Inevitability whispers.
and fuck off for lunch.
I did.
I could make this look much more impressive
If I wanted to be dishonest, the article almost writes itself.
Pick the strongest six posts. Put current events beside them. Add dates. Add arrows. Lose number 38.
MYSTERIOUS AI ACCOUNT POSTED THESE WARNINGS, THEN DISAPPEARED.
You would never need to know that the mysterious account was some bloke in Stockholm sitting there deciding whether THE SILENT SERVANT REMEMBERS sounded ominous enough.
That's the trick with prophets. Keep the hits. Forget the misses.
Eerie Truth Guy wasn't a prophet. He was a joke about things that were already happening. Sometimes the joke was decent. One time it involved the Yellow Inevitability.
What surprised me was simply that a few of the jokes felt different when I came back to them. Reality had moved a bit. That was enough.
Nine
The nine views used to embarrass me.
I'd imagined somebody spotting the 52 thing. Then someone else would notice 1:52. People would find the site. They'd argue about the countdown. Somebody would discover something I'd deliberately hidden; somebody else would find something I hadn't hidden and I'd pretend they were right.
There would be theories. Reddit, in my imagination, was extremely worried about the Yellow Inevitability.
What actually happened was that Eerie Truth Guy spent 52 days arranging his own disappearance in front of approximately enough people to share a large taxi.
I thought that meant I'd failed. I had, obviously. But I like the failure much more now.
If thousands of people had been watching post number one appear, the mystery wouldn't have stayed mysterious for long. Somebody would have traced the site back to me. There would have been screenshots, explanations, theories and eventually a YouTube video long enough to contain three sponsorship breaks.
Then somebody would have made a video explaining that video.
Instead, he just stopped. Nobody solved Eerie Truth Guy. Nobody exposed him. Nobody announced that they were bored with the project. There weren't enough people for any of that.
He simply became another abandoned thing on the internet.
There are billions of them. Dead websites. Forgotten profiles. Photographs nobody has looked at for ten years. Arguments with people whose names the participants no longer remember. Accounts belonging to people who moved away, changed jobs, became someone else or died.
The internet can forget something almost immediately without actually getting rid of it. That's where Eerie Truth Guy ended up.
I spent 52 days trying to make an internet ghost and managed, instead, to make something nobody noticed.
Five months later I went back. He was still there: 19 followers on X, nine views on the final post when the project ended, 52 stupid little pieces exactly where I'd left them.
Come look at this magnificent little corpse with me.
